In a semiconductor device manufacturing process, various processes such as etching, film formation and the like are performed in a vacuum atmosphere on a semiconductor wafer (hereinafter, referred to as “wafer”) that a substrate. A substrate processing apparatus for performing such processes on the substrate includes a processing module for generating a vacuum atmosphere and performing gas processing on the wafer and a load-lock module whose inner pressure can be changed to transfer the wafer between carrier of the wafer in a normal pressure atmosphere and the processing module.
In order to improve productivity of a semiconductor product, it is required to improve a throughput of the substrate processing apparatus. Therefore, a vacuum transfer module for generating a vacuum atmosphere and transferring the wafer is provided between the load-lock module and the processing module. A plurality of processing modules may be connected to the vacuum transfer module. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2013-171872 discloses a substrate processing apparatus including the vacuum processing module and having an improved throughput by processing two wafers by a single processing module.
There are various sizes and shapes of a space where the substrate processing apparatus can be installed in a factory, and an increase in the number of processing modules may be required at any time. Therefore, in the substrate processing apparatus, in addition to the increase in the throughput, a degree of freedom in the arrangement of the load-lock module and the processing module needs to be increased. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2013-171872 does not disclose a measure for solving the problem of the degree of freedom in the arrangement. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-179120 discloses a substrate processing apparatus in which a desired number of processing modules and transfer modules can be connected throng relay unit. However, as the number of processing modules is increased, the number of transfer modules is also increased and, thus, it is difficult to sufficiently reduce the footprint of the apparatus.